Anne of Greenville - Mariko Tamaki

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆☆
Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆☆
Overall: ⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Hello! Welcome to the inside of my book! My name is Anne, and this is my story. Yes, the WHOLE story is mine, all mine. Well, not exactly, but most of it is me. Even the not-so-pretty stuff. My moms say I have a tendency to get 'lost' in things, that I'm a daydreamer who is easily distracted. I take that as a compliment. Possibly you will read these pages and think they are a mess, and I will take that as a compliment, too! Possibly you will think I have terrible grammar. To that I will say, language is evolving. Maybe you'll read these pages and think, Is Anne the coolest or is it just me? A perfectly reasonable response to this book.

Where was I? Distracted. Right! More about me! I'm a queer Japanese American singer, actor, and choreographer of disco operas. I've recently moved to the most boring place in the world, also known as Greenville. I have a tendency to A) fall in love quickly, deeply, and effervescently and B) fly off the handle in the face of jerks...who are sadly in abundance in my new hometown. But Greenville is also where I met my new BFF, Berry, and first laid eyes on the girl of my dreams, Gilly - so it's not the worst place in the world.

It's close, though!

So yes, my first months in Greenville involved a series of increasingly dramatic and disastrous events that were somewhat sucky for me but will make for a thought-provoking and enjoyable read. If you like romance, being caught in the middle, exotic school outfits, golden retrievers, high school drama (societies), and love triangles, this is the book for you!

Want to see if I survive Greenville? If I land the big part and find my one true love? Turn the page and find out!"

Oof, I went back and forth for so long on how high to rate this book. If you average out the 5, 3, and 3 for each category, it's, what, 3.6? I still cant decide if that's accurate to how I felt about this, but I'm going with it. On the one hand, Anne roller skates! And very accurately describes the act of roller skating as being like "putting wings on your feet, like that god Hermes, but with way less family baggage." You also get excellent one-liners, such as:

"The butt, the softest but hardest landing of them all."

"Danny is 'aggressively gay' and I am 'deliriously queer.'"

On the other, I feel like the cover description is kind of an over-promise-under-deliver situation, unfortunately. Like, on paper, is all of it technically true? Sure. But while objectively factual, the reality of the reading experience was that you get miniscule tastes of her crush, her involvement in the play, the "love triangle" with hefty, disgusting, and truly irredeemable amounts of racism and homophobia in between. Which leads me to my other reason for not being sure how high to rate this book in spite of the massive amount of promise it held - why in the fuck did she and her moms move to Greenville?! 

Their move is explained in only the vaguest of terms. One of her moms is a vice principal, and they move a lot so she can work at different schools. The age-old story of public school admin families, constantly bouncing from place to place based on where the parent is stationed. Tale as old as time. But even if I buy the idea of  them moving to all these places to experience different school settings, I have to say the level of vitriol in that town, coupled with the complete lack of upside, would have for me and should have been for them an immediate nope the fuck out. 

In all honesty, it read like the author had this idea of someone moving to a new town and it being horrifically, inexplicably toxic, hostile, homophobic, and racist, but them being trapped there and having to find a way to stick it out...but then they never actually fleshed out why they had to be there, so instead they just wrote around it the entire book. Without the why, the entire thing falls flat. Add to that like 99% of the book being unforgivable acts of racism and homophobia and then the last twenty pages (literally, I counted) things turning on a dime and magically being better, and the wheels kind of start to fall off for me.

Overall, I liked Anne, her parents were great, Berry was solid, Bev was excellent, and I wish we had seen more of Gilly's dad because he seemed chill. I would have been very on board with the book if the plot had been developed better - give us a reason for being in Greenville, show us glimpses of the town being redeemable, if the antagonists are going to eventually turn things around make them more three-dimensional and less caricature-y - and if more time had been spent on the falling action. It had potential, but needed balance.